Political science.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

Last spring physicist William Happer found out what happens to federal scientists who ask the wrong questions. He was fired.

Happer, director of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy for two years, was asked to leave at the end of May. Although he was a political appointee, he had expected to remain until his replacement was nominated, since the Clinton administration had asked him to stay on in January. But he was pushed out two months beforehand. "I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy," he says. Now the DOE's former chief scientist is back at Princeton.

Happer made the mistake of crossing Vice President Al Gore, the Clinton administration's ranking environmentalist. In April, Happer testified before the House Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on Appropriations. "I think that there probably has been some exaggeration of the dangers of ozone and global climate change," he said. "One of the problems with ozone is that we don't understand how the UV-B is changing at ground level, and what fraction of the ultraviolet light really causes cancer."

Happer's cautious testimony was at odds with Gore's alarmist views. "Like an acid," Gore warns in his tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, chlorine from man-made refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) "burns a hole in the earth's protective ozone shield above Antarctica and depletes the ozone layer worldwide." Gore predicts that ozone depletion will damage crops and raise skin-cancer rates.

Gore's expectation is superficially plausible. Stratospheric ozone stops much of the sun's ultraviolet-B light from reaching the earth's surface, where excessive amounts can harm plants and animals. Sunburn is the type of UV damage with which most people are familiar. And recent satellite data indicate that ozone declined by 3 percent to 5 percent over the United States and Europe between 1979 and 1991.

But such a small decrease is hard to extract from the satellite data, since ozone levels vary widely depending upon seasons, latitude, and sunspot activity. (See "The Hole Story," June 1992.) For example, the amount of UV naturally reaching the ground in Florida is twice as great as that in Minnesota. A 5-percent depletion of ozone would increase UV-B exposure by the same amount as moving a mere 60 miles south. Few people worry about moving from Philadelphia south to Baltimore because of the resulting increase in UV-B exposure.

In any case, if...